While Elsevier outcompetes other publishers in terms of sheer volume, it also has the lowest retraction rate and highest rate of reinstating articles among nine top publishers of scholarly articles, a recent study has found. The study also found a tenth publisher to be an outlier in terms of reasons for retraction.
“Every publisher has their own retraction profile and retraction rates vary by two orders of magnitude,” Jonas Oppenlaender, author of the February preprint and a researcher at the University of Oulu in Finland, told Retraction Watch. “This reflects different editorial cultures and detection strategies, not just different levels of misconduct.”
Oppenlaender examined data from the Retraction Watch Database spanning 1997 to early 2026 to identify the top nine publishers with the most retractions. He also included the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), “because it is a major professional-society publisher that has not previously been examined in cross-publisher retraction studies,” he wrote in the preprint.
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